Hi everyone, not a regular poster by any means but I just wondered if anybody could recommend a NAS device to use at home.

Would mainly be used for storing photos from our cameras plus some music, home videos, films etc.

I'm not sure whether to choose one with two disks so I can set it to mirror the data. (Really wouldn't want to loose the pictures.) Or just get a single disk and back it up to some other location.

I've looked at one or two but reviews don't seem particularly consistent.

Thanks in advance.

Synology are a decent make for a home NAS, something like this with mirroring.

http://www.synology.com/products/product.php?product_name=DS212〈=uk

Or a 4 bay one with Raid 5(costs spiral though)

Could always one of those and have it backed up to a cloud service. I use Livedrive, everything backed up online, unlimited space, £5 a month.

I've got a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo v2 and love it. Got one (2TB) disk in it at the moment but plan to drop another in to mirror once I get the spare cash. Mostly for storing music and films.

It comes with a photo sharing add-on too - I'm not using it so can't tell you how good it is though: http://www.readynas.com/?p=5370

Synology would be my choice unless you're going to build it yourself.

I run a hp micro server (£250 to buy but £110 cashback) with nas4free.

Rock solid with 2*1tb and 2*2tb drives mirrored with zfs. Running FTP, windows file sharing (smb/cifs), apple file sharing (afp), BitTorrent, and ssh along with a ups so if the power dies it shuts down gracefully.

I bought a Zxyel NSA210 from dabs outlet on eBay for about £35. Stuck in a spare 250GB hard drive I had lying around. Now I have my music, pictures and some videos on it. It acts as an iTunes server as well and can be used as a squeezebox server with additional downloaded software.

It is only a single bay, however, so no RAID function.

DROBO. Uncomplicated storage management (just put some drives in and forget about it).

I have a HP Mediasmart server (Long obsolete), but even with mirroring or other redundancy always backup to another device and keep that backup away from your home and update regularly. Think what would happen if you had an incident in your home (flood, fire etc.) or simply deleted or messed up a file by mistake, having another copy away from your home will allow you to recover your data.

I have as well as the data on the NAS, a second backup on a USB HDD kept at home and another copy in my desk draw at work.

Another vote for HP Microserver (with the rebate) running freenas or whatever.

DROBO. Uncomplicated storage management (just put some drives in and forget about it).

But IMHO you're paying a drobo tax, a bit like apple tax, for something shiny that does the same as a less shiny device for a lot less.

I have a ReadyNas NV+ (v1) with 4 x 750GB disks running in a raid-5 configuration. Has been working well for the last 4+ years for me. Much better than my Buffalo Terastation which is now a doorstop (useless piece of slow performing junk).

Wow, I'm blown away by the response. Thanks everyone.

The HP Microserver is a great shout, especially with the cash back. I've never used NAS4Free though. Am I right in thinking that you don't need a separate OS such as Windows Server to use it. It is in effect the OS?

The Synology product looks the business and I have experience with Netgear stuff at work (switches and routers mainly) and they seem pretty reliable. So I'll take a look at those.

With the price of hard disks at the moment the costs can soon spiral out of control!

I was contemplating Buffalo for the price, but it sounds like they aren't great.

Cheers.

Correct, NAS4Free is the OS. It harnesses the wonderful file-system that is ZFS.

Correct, NAS4Free is the OS. It harnesses the wonderful file-system that is ZFS.

Yeah ZFS has saved my bacon a couple of times. I use it on Solaris as well as on the home server.

Was running FreeNas 7, I only noticed one drive was completely knackered when I wondered why the cpu usage was so high. One drive was completely knackered but ZFS' checksumming had completely "masked" it, I was happy to note Nas4Free has an email alert for that now (although I bashed out a bash script to run as a cron job to email if it found any bad sectors after that).

Nas4Free even emails me if the power goes off and the UPS kicks in (then shuts down gracefully once the battery in the UPS gets to a certain point - ups powers both modems and the router so the internet stays up as well), usually when someone unplugs it to use the hoover. :wonder:

[edit]

http://sourceforge.n...jects/nas4free/

The best way I found to get used to it was to play with it in a VM using something like Oracle's Virtualbox - which is also free.

https://www.virtualbox.org/

Have been pondering this for a while now as we have loads of videos and pictures of the children. I run a net gear ready nas and for 4, 2TB drives on raid 5 but that was £500 to buy and thats a bit over budget at home. I think mirroring would be ideal for home but where do you stop. The £5 a month unlimited cloud storage sounds good, £60 a year insurance really

Yeah ZFS has saved my bacon a couple of times.

It saved Briskoda back at the start of last year when we had all the trouble with the SATA disks.

I've only had one issue on ZFS a while ago on a client's production machine, where a zpool refused to come up. It was just before the -F switch was added to the zpool command which would have fixed it, so I think I ended up having to mess about with zdb to fix it. That issue was fixed and was the only one I ever heard of. I sometimes wish it was possible to do layered volumes in ZFS like in SVM / VxVM, but I can live without it. It's one of the best bits of software to come out in ten years or more. The only thing is, ZFS spoils you. You come to do things in VxVM or worse, Linux LVM and it just feels so old fashioned and annoying in comparison.

I run a net gear ready nas and for 4, 2TB drives on raid 5 but that was £500 to buy and thats a bit over budget at home.

The ReadyNAS Duo is only £99 diskless, only two bays though - and it will give you up to 3TB mirrored or 6TB without any security using big disks in it. Runs cool, quiet and cheap as the new (v2) is an ARM processor too. There's the NV+ if you need more bays which is a bit more expensive though.

if you got an old PC at home not being used why not try Unraid?

http://lime-technology.com/

had mine up for over 2 years, awesome

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/UnRAID_Wiki

Built my old PC into a Windows Home Server 2011 box, love it. Runs SABNZBD, sickbeard, itunes, remote access, remote streaming, backups.

I had a QNAP TS-210, but I put full blown Debian on it.

Then I sold it and built myself a server instead - 8-core CPU, 16GB RAM, 4TB of space...

(It runs VMWare ESX Server, thus runs many, many machines at once.)

Edited 11 July, 201213 yr by g_tee

The ReadyNAS Duo is only £99 diskless, only two bays though - and it will give you up to 3TB mirrored or 6TB without any security using big disks in it. Runs cool, quiet and cheap as the new (v2) is an ARM processor too. There's the NV+ if you need more bays which is a bit more expensive though.

Sorry yea the one at work is the nv+, like you say it's a good piece of kit

I have a Buffalo Linkstation 6tb.

2 x 3TB Seagate drives in a RAID1 configuration. Just has movies and TV shows on it to stream to my set top box. Seems very quiet and hasn't let me down (yet!).

Maybe not the fastest out there (can only write to the NAS at about 11Mbps but it works for what I need it to do perfectly.

I have a Theacus N2200, 2 bay drive with raid.

ITunes compatible, along with able to put torrent software on & leave torrents downloading without the need for a pc to be attached, Auto copy to drives when usb is plugged in, addtional usb slots for external usb drives can be plugged in, can also hook a printer that can be shared & queue prints.

Had it for 2 years & a brilliant piece of kit.

I have been following this as I need to fix my failing WHS, but I have a Mac and PC and have never found that the Mac/WHS combination works relaibly.

Can anyone recommend any of the options already discussed that would work with the Mac Time Machine (auto backup) and provide seemless storage for a Mac based system?

Thanks.

Can anyone recommend any of the options already discussed that would work with the Mac Time Machine (auto backup) and provide seemless storage for a Mac based system?

I'm using the ReadyNAS at work to backup a Mac Pro and an iMac with Time Machine. I'm using the v2 at home for my iMac, Macbook, Mac Mini and two iPhones and an iPad (streaming and storage). So the Netgear stuff is definitely fine with Macs and works well with Time Machine.

Just attached it to the network and let it auto-format the drive(s) and it appeared as a network drive via AFP.